Apparently the blogger's English students are doing translation exercises from Arabic into English by simply cutting and pasting from Google Translate, with predictably awkward results:

I started my post with a
rather strange appreciation of the skills needed to plagiarise. The
reason is because a lot of students do not even bother about
all skills mentioned. So if they don't use those skills and they
don't produce their authentic work, then what do they do? They simply
go to this tool which was created for great purposes, none of which I
am sure is to help students cheat: www.translate.google.com
. They simply paste their Arabic text in there and get a ready made
piece of writing in English.

The messily-translated
chunks of language submitted can be outrageous but hilarious at the
same time. And I say it's messy because as a machine translator it
translates things literally in terms of meaning and discards any
grammatical rules of the second language most of the time; it simply
follows the word order of the translated language. The effect, my
respected readers, can be speechless, as you realise. One student for
instance, typed all the Arabic he wanted to express and clicked to
translate it into English. Apparently the student wanted to translate
the word 'feather' (singular) to English. Note that the Arabic word
for feather and badminton (the sport) is the same. The student ended
up submitting something that is along the lines of 'the badminton of
the bird'...which is interesting if you think about it; but maybe in a
fictional text rather than non-fictional prose?

The blogger doesn't post much but there are a few interesting posts on such minority languages as Jabbali, and on a subject we've discussed here a time or two, Cypriot Maronite Arabic. (Earlier posts by me on this curious dialect here and here.)

2 comments:

Jonathan Wright
said...

For anyone interested in the workings of Google Translate, here's an interesting feature that deserves investigation. The other day I typed in an Arabic text continued the phrase 'al-lugha l-3arabiya l-fusha' (the classical Arabic language, roughly), and Google Translate came back in English with 'Mandarin'. I'd be most interested to know what the mechanism is that came up with that!

I can sort of see a relationship (though Mandarin is not identical with Classical Chinese), but it certainly could lead to some hilarious results if you actually just copied it. "Mandarin, based on the language of the Qur'an ..." (Besides, in the PRC you're supposed to say Putonghua these days anyway. "Mandarin" is too class-ridden,)

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